Dan Walker, former governor of Illinois, died Wednesday at age 92 at his home in Chula Vista, Calif., according to his son, Dan Walker Jr.

Walker, a Democrat, was elected in 1972. He was a Montgomery Ward executive who had burst into prominence in 1971 with his epic 1,197 mile walk across the state, from Kentucky to the Wisconsin border. He was charismatic, with a broad smile and a thatch of hair often described as worthy of a Kennedy.
He defeated incumbent Gov. Richard Ogilvie, 51 percent to 49 percent, in the …

Uber-liberal Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown is ringing alarm bells on campaign contributions again, pointing fingers squarely on one side and completely ignoring the other. This time, Brown is focusing on the $4 million donation Sam Zell made to Gov. Bruce Rauner’s (R-Ill.) Turnaround Illinois PAC. As he writes in his latest piece: I really don’t want to be a class warrior, but what I continue to see going down is that rich people, no longer satisfied with the privileges…

In 2009, Obama and the Democrats rammed the $840 billion federal stimulus package through Capitol Hill under the guise of immediate job creation and economic recovery. An estimated $64 billion went to public school districts; another nearly $50 billion went for other education spending. This included $13 billion for low-income public school kids; $4.1 billion for Head Start and childcare services; $650 million for educational technology; $200 million for working college students; and $70 million for homeless children.

How’s that all working out? Last week, economists from the St. Louis Federal Reserve surveyed more than 6,700 education stimulus recipients and concluded that for every $1 million of stimulus grants to a district, a measly 1.5 jobs were created. “Moreover, all of this increase came in the form of nonteaching staff,” the report found, and the “jobs effect was also not statistically different from zero.”

More than three-quarters of the jobs “created or saved” in the first year of the stimulus were government jobs, while roughly 1 million private sector jobs were forestalled or destroyed, according to Ohio State University. President Obama later admitted “there was no such thing” as “shovel-ready projects.” But there were plenty of pork-ready recipients, from green energy billionaires to union bosses to Democratic campaign finance bundlers. About $230 billion in porkulus funds was set aside for infrastructure projects, yet less than a year later, Obama was back asking for another $50 billion to pour down the infrastructure black hole.